Perdido Street Station Part 49

"Great!" said Lemuel archly, and clapped twice. "That's that sorted. So you can go up, and then . . . um . . . you can look around for us, chuck us down a message . . ."

Isaac and Derkhan were ignoring Lemuel. They were still staring at Yagharek.

"It is right that I should go," said Yagharek. "I am at home so high," he said and his voice clucked slightly, as if at a sudden emotion. "I am at home so high, and I am a hunter. I can look down on the landscape within and see where the moths might lurk. I can gauge the possibilities within the gla.s.s."

Yagharek retraced Lemuel's steps up the sh.e.l.l of the Gla.s.shouse.

He had unwrapped the foetid bandages from his feet, and his talons had stretched out in a delightful reflex. He had scrambled up the initial patch of bare metal with Lemuel's grappling rope, and then had climbed far faster and more confidently than the human had done.

He stopped every so often and stood swaying in the warm wind, his avian toes gripping the metal slats tightly and securely. He would lean alarmingly and peer into the hazy air, hold out his arms a little, feel the wind fill his spreadeagled body like a sail.

Yagharek pretended he was flying.

Swinging from his thin belt was the stiletto and the bullwhip he had stolen the previous day. The whip was a clumsy thing, not nearly so fine as the one he had cracked in the hot desert air, stinging and snaring, but it was a weapon his hand remembered.

He was fast and a.s.sured. The airs.h.i.+ps that were visible were all far away. He was unseen.

At the top of the Gla.s.shouse, the city seemed to be a gift to him, laid out ready to be taken. Everywhere he looked, fingers and hands and fists and spines of architecture thrust rudely into the sky. The Ribs like ossified tentacles reaching always up; the Spike slammed into the city's heart like a skewer; the complex mechanistic vortex of Parliament, glowing darkly; Yagharek mapped them with a cold, strategic eye. He glanced up and to the east, to where the skyrail connecting Flyside Tower and the Spike thrummed.

When he had reached the edge of the enormous gla.s.s globe at the dome's tip, it took him only a moment to find the rent in the gla.s.s. A part of him was surprised that his eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, could still perform for him as they used to.

Below him, a foot or two under the gently curving ladder, the gla.s.s of the dome was dry and scaled with bird and wyrmen droppings. He tried to peer through, but he could make out nothing beyond the shadowy suggestions of roofs and streets.

Yagharek struck out across the gla.s.s itself.

He moved tentatively, feeling with his talons, tapping the gla.s.s to test it, sliding as quickly as he could to a metal frame for his claws to grip. As he moved he realized how at ease he had become with climbing. All those weeks and weeks of night-time climbing, on the roof of Isaac's workshop, up into deserted towers, seeking the city's crags. He climbed easily and without fear. He was more ape than bird, it seemed.

He skittered nervously across the dirty panes, until he breached the final wall of girders that separated him from the split in the gla.s.s. And when he vaulted that, the fault was before him.

Leaning over, Yagharek could feel heat gusting from the lamplit depths within. The night outside was warm, but the temperature within must be very high.

He wound the grappling hook carefully around the metal joist at one side of the crack and tugged it hard to ensure it was secure. Then he wrapped the end of the rope three times around his waist. He gripped it near the hook, lay across the girder and put his head in through the lips of broken gla.s.s.

It felt like pus.h.i.+ng his face into a bowl of strong tea. The air inside the Gla.s.shouse was hot, almost stiflingly so, and full of smoke and steam. It shone with a hard, white light.

Yagharek blinked his eyes clean and s.h.i.+elded them, then looked down on the cactus town.

In the centre, below the ma.s.sive nugget of gla.s.s at the dome's tip, the houses had been cleared away and a stone temple had been built. It was red stone, a steep ziggurat, that reached a third of the way to the Gla.s.shouse roof. Every stepped level was lush with desert and veldt vegetation, abloom in garish reds and oranges against their waxy green skins.

A little rim of land, about twenty feet wide, had been cleared all around it, beyond which point the streets of Riverskin had been left. The cartography was a snarled puzzle, a collection of road-ends and the rumps of avenues, here the corner of a park and there half a church, even the stump of a ca.n.a.l, now a trough of stagnant water, cut off by the edge of the dome. Lanes criss-crossed the little towns.h.i.+p at odd angles, segments cut from longer streets where the dome had been placed over them. A little random patch of alleys and roads had been contained, sealed under gla.s.s. Its content had changed even as the outlines remained mostly the same.

The chaotic aggregate of street-stubs had been reformed by the cactacae. What, years ago, had been a wide thoroughfare had been made a vegetable garden, the edges of its lawns flush with the houses on either side, little trails from front doors indicating the routes between patches of pumpkin and radishes.

Ceilings had been removed four generations ago to convert human houses into homes for their new, much taller inhabitants. Rooms had been added to the tops and backsides of buildings, styled like weird miniature effigies of the stepped pyramid in the centre of the Gla.s.shouse. The additional buildings had been wedged into every s.p.a.ce possible, to cram the dome with cactacae, and strange agglomerations of human architecture and monolithic, stone-slab edifices stretched in big blocks of variegated colour. Some were several storeys tall.

Swaying, dipping bridges of wood and rope were draped between many of the upper floors, linking rooms and buildings on opposite sides of streets. In many of the yards and on the tops of many buildings, low walls enclosed flat desert-gardens, with tiny patches of scrubby gra.s.s, a few low cactuses and undulating sand.

Little flocks of captive birds that had never found the shattered vents to the outside city swept low over the houses and called out in hunger. With a lurch of adrenalin and nostalgic shock, Yagharek recognized a bird-call from the Cymek. There were dune-eagles, he realized, perching on one or two roofs.

Rising around them on all sides, the dome refracted New Crobuzon like a dirty gla.s.s sky, rendering the surrounding houses a confusion of darkness and deflected light. The whole diorama below him thronged with cactus people. Yagharek scanned slowly, but he could not see another sapient race.

The simple bridges swung as cactacae pa.s.sed over them in all directions. In the sand-gardens, Yagharek saw cactacae with big rakes and wooden paddles carefully sculpting the sastrugi that mimicked the rippling dunes made by the wind. Here in this tightly closed s.p.a.ce, bounded on every side, there were no gusts to carve patterns, and the desert landscape had to be wrought by hand.

The streets and paths were tight crammed with cactacae buying and selling in the market, arguing gruffly too low for Yagharek to hear. They pulled wooden carts by hand, two working together if the vehicle or load was particularly large. There were no constructs in sight, no cabs, no animals of any sort beyond the birds and a few rock-rabbits Yagharek caught sight of on the ledges of buildings.

In the city outside, cactacae women wore great shapeless dresses like sheets. Here in the Gla.s.shouse they wore only loincloths of white and beige and dun cloth, exactly like the men. Their b.r.e.a.s.t.s were somewhat larger than the men's, and tipped with dark green nipples. In a few places, Yagharek could see a woman carrying a baby held tight to her chest, the child unworried by the pinp.r.i.c.k wounds its mother's spines inflicted. Boisterous little gangs of cactacae children played on corners, ignored or cuffed absently by pa.s.sing adults.

On every part of the pyramid temple were cactacae elders, reading, gardening, smoking and talking. Some wore sashes of red or blue around their shoulders, that stood out strongly against their pale green skin.

Yagharek's skin was p.r.i.c.kling with sweat. Wafts of woodsmoke blurred his vision. They rose from a hundred chimneys at all different heights, trickling gently into the sky and eddying in slow mushrooming gusts. A few hazy threads found their way up and seeped from the cracks and holes in the gla.s.s sky. But with the wind kept out and the sun magnified by the vaulted translucent bubble, there were no breezes or bl.u.s.ter to dissipate the fumes. The underside of the gla.s.s, Yagharek saw, was coated in greasy soot.

There was still more than an hour to sundown. Yagharek glanced to his left and saw that the orb of gla.s.s atop the dome seemed to be bursting with light. It was sucking up every sc.r.a.p of the sun's emissions, concentrating them and sending them vividly into every nook of the Gla.s.shouse, filling it with unforgiving light and heat. He saw that the metal casing which held it was wired for power, with cables snaking down the insides of the dome and disappearing from sight.

The flat sand-garden at the top of the layered tower at the Gla.s.shouse's centre was covered in complex machinery. Exactly below the swollen nugget of clear gla.s.s was a huge lensed machine, with fat pipes snaking out into vats around it. A cactacae with a coloured sash polished its copper workings.

Yagharek remembered rumours he had heard in Shankell, stories about a heliochymical engine of immense thaumaturgic power. He looked carefully at the glowing contraption, but its purpose was quite opaque.

As he watched, Yagharek became conscious of the large number of armed posses that were evident. He narrowed his eyes. He was gazing down at them like some G.o.d, seeing every surface of the little cactus town in the fierce light of the gla.s.s globe. He could see almost all the rooftop gardens, and it seemed to him that on at least half, a group of three or four cactus were stationed. They sat or stood, their expressions unreadable at such a distance, but the ma.s.sive, weighty rivebows they carried were unmistakable. Hatchets dangled from their belts, curved poleaxes glowed in the reddening light.

There were more of the little patrols beside stalls in the sprawling market, sitting alert on the lowest level of the central temple, and walking the streets with a deliberate step, rivebows c.o.c.ked and ready.

Yagharek saw the looks that the armed guards received, the nervous salutations and the frequent skyward glances of the populace.

He did not think that this situation was normal.

Something was making the cactus people uneasy. They could be truculent and taciturn, in his experience, but the subdued air of menace was like nothing he had experienced in Shankell. Perhaps, he reflected, these cactacae were different, a more sombre breed than their southern siblings. But he felt his skin p.r.i.c.kle. The air was fraught.

Yagharek concentrated, and began to scan the inside of the dome with a hard, rigorous eye. He focused carefully, went into something of a hunter's trance.

He started looking at the edges of the dome. He took in the whole inside circ.u.mference in one long, slow sweep, then spiralled his vision carefully towards the centre, examining and investigating the circle of houses and streets a little way in, and then further in again.

In this exacting, methodical way, he could cast his eye on every nook and cranny of the Gla.s.shouse's surfaces. His eyes stopped briefly, momentarily, on imperfections of the red stone, then moved on.

As the day came closer to its end, the nervousness of the cactus people seemed to increase.

Yagharek came to the end of his scanning sweep. There was nothing immediate, nothing clearly wrong that leapt out at him. He turned his attention to the inside of the roof immediately around him, looking for some purchase.

It would not be easy. Some way from him the girders coalesced around the heavy gla.s.s globe, but on the underside of the gla.s.s they were not as protuberant. He believed that with some effort he could climb them: as, probably, could Lemuel and perhaps Derkhan or one or two of the adventurers. But it was hard to imagine Isaac clinging so close and holding his bulk suspended, crawling hundreds of yards of dangerous metal piping to the earth.

The sun was low outside. Even with the languorous summer evenings, time was short.

He felt someone tap his back. Yagharek raised his head up, lifting it out of the inverted bowl into the air of New Crobuzon, air that felt suddenly chill.

Behind him, Shadrach was crouched on the gla.s.s. He wore a mirror-helm, and held out a similar piece cobbled together from plate iron towards Yagharek.

Shadrach's helmet looked different. Yagharek's was a rude piece of rescued metal. Shadrach's was intricate, wired and valved with copper and bra.s.s. At the top was a socket, with holes to screw in some fitting. It was only the mirrors that seemed a makes.h.i.+ft addition.

"You forgot this," Shadrach said in his gentle voice, waving the helmet. "No waved flag, no word from you for twenty minutes. I'm here to check you're alive and all right."

Yagharek showed him the girders inside the dome. He and Shadrach discussed the problem of Isaac in urgent whispered tones.

"You must go down," said Yagharek. "You must go by the sewers, with Lemuel as your guide. You must find your way as fast as you can into the dome. Send some of the mechanical monkeys to me, to aid me if I am attacked. Look inside."

Shadrach leaned over carefully and peered into the darkening gla.s.s. Yagharek pointed down, across the thronging village at a crumbling ghost-building by the vile ca.n.a.l end. The water, its towpaths and a little finger of torn land on which the broken house stood were all enclosed by an accidental fence of rubble, brambles and long-rusted barbed wire. The rejected sliver of s.p.a.ce backed directly onto the dome, which swept up steeply over it like a flat cloud.

"You must find your way there." Shadrach began to make some sound, murmuring about the impossibility, but Yagharek cut him off. "It is difficult. It will be difficult. But you cannot climb down from here on the inside, and if you can then Isaac certainly cannot. We need him inside. You must take him in. As fast as you can. I will come down to you, I will find you, when I have found the slake-moths. Wait for me."

As he spoke, Yagharek strapped the makes.h.i.+ft helmet on his head and investigated the field of view it gave behind him.

He caught Shadrach's eye in one of the big slivers of mirror.

"You must go. Be quick. Be patient. I will come to you and find you before the night is out. The moths must leave by this break, and so I will wait and watch for them."

Shadrach's face set. Yagharek was right. It was unthinkable that Isaac would be able to climb down the steep and dangerous iron rafters.

He nodded at Yagharek curtly, signalling goodbye into the garuda's mirrors, then turned and scrambled back to the main ladder, descended at expert speed out of sight.

Yagharek turned and looked into the last of the sun. He breathed deeply and flickered his eyes from left to right, checking his vision in each jagged mirror. He calmed himself completely. He breathed in the slow rhythm of the yajhu-saak yajhu-saak, the hunter's reverie, the martial trance of the Cymek garuda. He composed himself.

After some minutes there came the skittering clatter of metal and wire on gla.s.s, and one by one three monkey-constructs came into view, approaching him from different directions. They gathered around him and waited, their gla.s.s lenses glinting rose in the evening, their thin pistons hissing as they moved.

Yagharek turned and regarded them through the mirrors. Then, gripping the rope carefully, he began to lower himself through the hole in the gla.s.s. He gesticulated at the constructs to follow him as he slipped past the gash. The heat of the dome washed up around him and closed over his head as he descended into the gla.s.s-bounded village, towards houses immersed in red light as the clear globe magnified and dispersed the setting sun's rays, into the slake-moths' lair.

CHAPTER F FORTY-THREE.

Outside the dome, the air darkened inexorably. With the onset of the night, the bright rays that burst from the gla.s.s globe in the dome's roof were snuffed out. The Gla.s.shouse grew suddenly dimmer and more cool. But much of the heat was retained. The dome was still far warmer than the city outside. The lights from the torches and the buildings within reflected back on the gla.s.s. To the travellers looking back on the city from Flag Hill, to the slum-dwellers gazing desultorily down from the towerblocks of Ketch Heath, to the officer glancing from the skyrail and the driver of the south-bound Sud Line train, peering through smokestacks and flues, over the smoke-soiled roofscape of the city, the Gla.s.shouse looked stretched out taut, distended with light.

As dusk fell, the Gla.s.shouse began to glow.

Clinging to the metal on the inside skin of the dome, unnoticed like some infinitesimal tic, Yagharek slowly flexed his arms. He was affixed to a little knot of scaffolding about one-third of the way down the height of the dome. He was still easily high enough to look down on all the housetops, the tangles of architecture on all sides.

His mind was poised in yajhu-saak yajhu-saak. He breathed slowly and regularly. He continued his hunter's search, his eyes flitting restlessly from point to point below him, not spending more than a moment on each place, building up a composite picture. Occasionally he would unfocus and take in the whole sweep of the roofs below him, alert for any strange movements. He returned his attention often to the sc.u.m-covered trench of water where he had told Shadrach to a.s.semble the others.

There was no sign of the band of intruders.

As the night deepened, the streets cleared at extraordinary speed. The cactacae flocked back to their houses. From a teeming towns.h.i.+p, the Gla.s.shouse emptied, became a ghost town in a little over half an hour. The only figures left on the streets were the armed patrols. They moved nervously through the streets. Lights from windows were dimmed as shutters and curtains were closed. There were no gaslights in these streets. Instead, Yagharek watched lamp-lighters walk the length of the streets, reaching out with flaming poles to ignite oil-soaked torches ten feet above the pavements.

Each of the lamp-lighters was accompanied by a cactacae patrol, moving nervously, pugnacious and furtive through the obscuring streets.

On the top of the central temple, a group of cactus elders was moving around the central mechanism, pulling levers and tugging at handles. The enormous lens at the top of the device swung down on a ponderous hinge. Yagharek peered closely, but he could not discern what they were doing or what the machine was for. He watched without comprehension as the cactacae swung the thing around, about a vertical and a horizontal axis, checking and adjusting gauges according to obscure calibrations.

Above Yagharek's head, two of the chimpanzee-constructs clung to the metal. The other was a few feet below him, on a strut parallel to his own. They were quite motionless, waiting for him to move.

Yagharek settled back, and waited.

Two hours after sundown, the gla.s.s of the dome looked black. The stars were invisible.

The streets of the cactacae Gla.s.shouse glowed with a forbidding, sepia firelight. The patrols had become shadows on a darker street.

There were no sounds beyond the undertone of burning, the soft complaints of architecture and the sound of whispering. Occasional lights flitted like will-o'-the-wisps between the slowly cooling bricks.

There was still no sign of Lemuel, Isaac and the others. A small part of Yagharek's mind was unhappy at this, but for the most part he was still inside, concentrating on the relaxation technique of the hunting trance.

He waited.

Some time between ten and eleven o'clock, Yagharek heard a sound.

His attention, which had spread out to suffuse him, to saturate his awareness, focused instantly. He did not breathe.

Again. The tiniest rippling, a snap like cloth in the wind.

He twisted his neck around and stared towards the noise, down at the ma.s.s of streets, into the fearful dark.

There was no response from the watchtower at the Gla.s.shouse's centre. Fancies crept through Yagharek's mind, deep inside. Perhaps he had been deserted, a part of him thought. Perhaps the dome was empty but for him and the monkey-constructs, and some unearthly floating lights in the depths of the streets.

He did not hear the sound again, but a shade of deep black pa.s.sed across his eyes. Something huge flitted up through the murk.

Terrified at some semi-conscious level far below the calm surface of his thoughts, Yagharek felt himself stiffen and grip the metal in his fingers, flatten himself painfully against the dome's supports. He snapped his head away, facing the metal that he held. Intently, carefully, he stared into the mirrors before his eyes.

Some fell-creature inched its way up the Gla.s.shouse skin.

The shape was almost exactly opposite him, as far away as it could be. It had sprung from some building below and flown a tiny distance to the gla.s.s, from there to crawl hand over tendril over claw, up towards the cooler air and the uncontained darkness.